The Politics of Islamic Hip-Hop

Music is universal, so it probably shouldn't be surprising that an
increasing number of Muslim young people--especially those growing up in
the cultural mixing bowls of Europe--are listening to and performing
hip-hop music. But there could be more to it than that, as globalization
and the tumultuous politics of North Africa, the Middle East, and South
Asia are leading many young Muslims to express themselves and expand
the counter-culture through this famously political form of music. Peter Mandaville writes in Yale Global,
Yale's publication studying the effects of globalization, that "The
Rise of Islamic Hip-Hop" is about much more than just music. The
movement began as a reaction to the spread of Western hip hop's
popularity among young Muslims living in Europe.

Beginning
with the group Mecca2Medina in London in 1997, the Muslim hip-hop
movement has grown with impressive speed even as it struggles to achieve
mainstream recognition within both the Muslim community and the wider
hip-hop scene. Many Muslim artists cite passing references to Islam in
mainstream hip-hop, and in their minds, the natural extension is to
bring a religious identity front and center. For some, hip-hop is also a
vehicle for engaging world politics. Figures like Fun-Da-Mental
frontman Aki Nawaz attracted controversy for the 2006 album “All Is
War,” which some viewed as glorifying terrorism. The music of another
edgy act, Blakstone, features aggressive and confrontational lyrics. ...
Many Muslim hip-hop artists, such as the female spoken word duo Poetic
Pilgrimage, complain about persistent racism, even within Muslim
communities in the West, contending that their work transcends ethnic
and racial barriers.

Mandaville says that rap music might be
playing this role because Muslims in Europe can identify with American
black communities that created the form.

Listening to South Asian
Muslim teenagers in this post-industrial British city, one can
understand how Islamic faith and American hip-hop music coexist.
Searching for music that reflects their own experiences with alienation,
racism and silenced political consciousness, many teens, even
quasi-religious groups, turn to the urban music of black America.

But
what are the politics of this emerging genre? Mandaville notes that hip
hop is traditionally leftist, but that its Islamic tinge both
reinforces that liberalism while also complicating it with conservative
religious overtones:

These developments become more significant
when one considers the demographics of Islam, with some 70 percent of
the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under the age of 30. Embracing hip-hop
could be a fad or signal young Muslims’ growing affinity with leftist
values. Islam, however, has never fit comfortably on a political
spectrum defined in conventional terms of right and left. The Islamic
worldview is socially conservative in most of its mainstream forms, but
the centrality of social justice in Islam has always meant that Islamic
parties share some common ground with the left – even where the politics
between them are contentious.

Mandaville says this movement
could signal "sparks of growing cooperation between Islamists and
leftists in the Middle East" as young people become "dissatisfied with
the failure of conventional Islamist groups to deliver results." Musical
"avenues of political expression and mobilization" could grant young
Muslims the ability to form and disseminate political beliefs or even
political ideologies without the need for traditional Islamic
institutions or religious groups.